Other Worlds For Pihuaq Omilgoetok With an ulu Pihuaq slices off caribou from the rib cage on the floor, offers us dried meat dipped in goose grease. Her smile is slow, broad like a qulliq, the seal oil lamp her mother used to light in the dark iglu She shows us traces of carbon in her wrists where she tried to tattoo herself as a girl to look like her grandmother, a beauty with etchings up and down her arms, parallel lines on her face – old women had drawn sooty threads under her skin a little at a time. Television catches pihuaq’s attention: on PBS, the History of Women’s Fashion – during World War II when nylons were scarce a model draws a black line up the back of her legs. Pihuaq’s voice comes softly from deep in her gut, works its way into words that halt at the throat as she rhymes her children off her fingers: Eva, Alice, Anna, Meyok, Akoluk, Sammy, Bells. The litany omits the three who died – wounds she’s not ready to open for strangers. by Margo Button5 Cambridge Bay, Nunavut